A Christmas decoration left on a trailside tree branch at Big Woods Lake Recreation Area in northern Cedar Falls (Pat Kinney photo)
CEDAR FALLS — It’s Dec. 26, 2024 and I marked the day after Christmas with a brisk two-mile walk around a tranquil lake in the north part of town.
Eighty years ago today, my dad began a different kind of journey. He left me a record of it in his diary from World War II.
On Dec. 26, 1944, Dad landed in Le Havre, France. It was the same day Gen. Patton’s soldiers of the U.S. Third Army relieved their besieged comrades of the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, Belgium.
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The Battle of the Bulge was still raging. By the time it was finished a month later, 19,000 American soldiers were dead. Another 46,000 wounded and another 23,000 were missing.
My dad’s job was to help get some of those soldiers healed and home. In Europe, he was put to work as an orderly on a hospital train, bringing wounded back from the front.
My dad, George J. Kinney, standing, and a buddy at the doors of a hospital train car in Belgium in early 1945...
My dad, drafted into the Army in 1942, had been a miliary policeman at Camp Phillips in Kansas, guarding German prisoners of war. He volunteered to go overseas.
Back home in Waterloo, my mom was working in a bomb factory. She reamed mortar rounds on a production line at Associated Manufacturing.
She also was raising my big brother Mike, nine months old at the time, and living with my grandma, Dad’s mom.
My folks had been married in Salina, Kan. near Camp Phillips in June 1943. They met at my grandma’s restaurant in downtown Waterloo where Mom had been waiting tables. Mom took the train from Waterloo to Salina where there were married in June 1943. Mike came along nine months later.
In one letter home to Mom, Dad hinted at what he saw at the front and on the hospital train.
“Some of these boys are so cripped up I don’t think they’ll ever be the same again,” he wrote.
My mom, Margaret Ann Gardner Kinney, sent my dad this photo of her and my big brother Mike, circa 1944-45. It was in Dad’s war diary. I think Mom’s fur coat was a gift from my grandma, who loved fur coats.
I also found out later, from an Army rail conductor I interviewed for a feature story in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier that those trains were subject to snipers and saboteurs. The conductor, in 1997, had finally received his Purple Heart for a belly wound from a sniper.
Dad was discharged from the Army at Camp Grant, Ill. on Dec. 27, 1945. He would return home two months shy of my brother Mike’s second birthday.
My peaceful walk around the lake was far different from my folks’ world when Dad set foot in France 80 years ago today.
And whether our holiday season is good, bad or in between we should all count our blessings and give thanks to those who went before us.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription .
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